Ep. 181 - How Fast-Growing SaaS Companies Are Modernizing Their Revenue Stack

Guest: Mark Walker, CEO at Nue.io 

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SaaS pricing isn’t breaking because of AI — it’s breaking because most revenue systems were never built for the speed and complexity of today’s models.

In this episode, Mark Walker, CEO of Nue.io, joins host Ken Lempit to unpack why modern SaaS and AI companies are abandoning legacy CPQ and billing stacks for a flexible, unified revenue infrastructure built for rapid change.

Key highlights:

• Why legacy CPQ + billing can’t support modern SaaS pricing
• How committed consumption + bank-billed models are reshaping monetization
• Why speed of configuration is now a GTM advantage
• What RevOps must rethink as pricing experiments explode
• How elite teams thrive on hard problems and high-velocity execution

If you’re a B2B SaaS founder, CRO, CMO, or RevOps leader navigating complex pricing models, upgrading your revenue stack, or preparing for next-gen AI monetization, this conversation will change how you think about scaling.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS and AI CEOs and go to market leaders, accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Mark Walker, CEO at Nue.io, a revenue lifecycle platform that integrates CPQ, billing and analytics for every revenue and GTM model in a single platform.

Hey, Mark, welcome to the podcast. 

[00:00:35] Mark Walker: Hey, Ken, nice to be here. 

[00:00:38] Ken Lempit: I'm really excited to record your episode, but before we jump into it, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company? 

[00:00:46] Mark Walker: I'm not the founder of Nue, I had the privilege to join really early in its evolution Nue was created by an incredible woman named Tina Kung.

she's our founder and CTO. And the vision for Nue is really, really super simple. As the pace of change a business goes up and you know, obviously in the AI era, it's going up very, very quickly. You need to have less complexity in the system. Single systems that are more powerful.

And so she had this vision to bring together the coding systems and the, and the self-service systems and the billing systems into one continuous system. And, and that has turned out to be a very prescient decision. She's a very wise and far thinking person, and it's led us to have a massive footprint in ai.

[00:01:28] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting. You know, I've always had a pretty deep interest in pricing in the software space, and it makes a lot of sense that you'd want to have the front end of that, like where it meets the market, be integrated with the billing system and, and also, you know, being able to get some deep insight as a result.

So, seems like she was on to something when she did that. 

[00:01:52] Mark Walker: Yeah, I think the really brilliant thing she did is, is not compromise on any of those parts. So even though Nue is, if you think of it like the next generation of Salesforce, CPQ, and then the next generation of Zuora. Then the next generation of, I'm not sure what the generation of, of self-service that you'd be replacing would be and agentic,

right, and agentic at a world class level. Each of those pieces is actually, not only available by itself, but actually purchased by itself, which is really kind of extraordinary as a young software company that each of the parts is world class. 

[00:02:29] Ken Lempit: I, I wanna start with the CPQ element of it. 'cause, you know, that's, I guess a, an entry point or a logical starting place.

And from what I've learned, it's been a real difference maker for your customers. lot of flexibility and power in that part of the, of the platform. Can you, just tell us what's unique about it and why is that resonating so strongly right now? 

[00:02:51] Mark Walker: Three things that are unique about it.

The one that is most widely known I think is the fact that it's used by basically everybody you've ever heard of in ai. Like, so not, obviously not everybody, but open ai, Anthropic, Glean, Jasper, Legora, Sierra Cursor. I'm probably, I'm definitely leaving some amazing, amazing companies out. The reason why they all adopted the same system is because of two different things.

One is speed. Speed is the ultimate feature now, and the fact that it can be implemented really, really quickly. So we'll talk more about why that is in a second. But the second one is that it handles the new emerging pricing models, the, the committed consumption models that people are having to deploy to enable, really an uncertain uncertainty in their customer base about which of their products the customer's actually gonna consume. And so the support for all these complex models and being able to make it simple to contract is, is the second, you know, really big thing. And, and the third one frankly, is that literally none of our customers need an ongoing consultant to run it.

So it's also beautifully easy to own. And that's pretty amazing. So some of our customers are multi-billion dollar companies, so. 

[00:04:05] Ken Lempit: I mean, I think the, the strongest objection I hear across category in any software is if I need an army of consultants to make it run, you know, I probably don't want it anymore.

You know, it's like unnecessary overhead given. Other choices they might have. Is, is that part of it really strong in terms of your acceptance? I mean, you mentioned it, but I'm just wondering how important that really is. 

[00:04:30] Mark Walker: Yeah, I mean, so I think there's a couple of different things. Definitely. So Open AI went live in, eight weeks, multi-billion dollars.

Multicurrency, multi jurisdiction, multi-sale teams, multi verticals, multi-product lines in eight weeks. That says a lot more about Open AI and their execution culture. But Anthropic went live in 12, right? Which is 50% slower. But again, they're different business, but that's still incredibly fast, right?

And you know, Chili Piper, you know, very fast. So this, this speed of execution is because we didn't just, it's not because the software is simple. The software's actually incredibly powerful, but we basically hid the complexity in an interface that was designed for the owner, for the administrator, for the person who owned it.

So, so they don't have to deal with the complexity of the model, they just deal with the quite straightforward configuration of what the outcome is. And so a lot of people pay a lot of attention to, to the user experience for the end user. We did that for sure. It looks like, you know, somebody was, described it as Salesforce the way you wish it was, or, or Hub NetSuite redesigned by HubSpot.

Right. You know, something like that. But we also did the same thing, part of Tina's Vision was to do the same thing for the administration experience and what that does, it lowers, it lowers the gap or removes the gap between ideation and thinking about what you want to do and doing it, which is actually where problems really come up in, in the deployment of CPQ.

The person who knows how to configure it, doesn't know what they want to do, and the person knows what they wanna do, doesn't know how to configure it. Well that's not a problem in Nue. 

[00:06:10] Ken Lempit: That's really interesting. You know, we had, Brent Adamson On the podcast a few weeks ago, and, he was the co-author of The Challenger Sale and the Challenger Customer, and he had now has a new book it's, I think, called Frame Making.

And it's about, the no decision part of selling and a big part of no decision according to his research, is that customers lack confidence in two areas. One, that they can make a good decision, and number two, that they can implement what it is they've decided upon. So, if you can take away one of those two big, lacks of confidence, lacks lacking of confidence situations you know, you can make your own revenue accelerate even faster.

That's really interesting. 

[00:06:53] Mark Walker: And the interesting thing we're seeing in the marketplace that relates to that is, is no decision is kind of not on the table now, right? Like in there's no decision is deciding to fail because for sure 100% of the existing systems do not support the new emerging pricing models.

Like that's definitely true. You might be able to customize. A system to kind of do one version of it for a while, but that is a decision, like that is a decision to actually build something new. You just now you're a software company with a customer base of one, and so recently in our pipeline over the past year, no decision has basically just disappeared.

Like everybody's making a decision. They either make a decision to move to something really, really simple because they don't think they have that problem. Or they move to us, basically. And so, and obviously there are other people who are not in our pipeline who may be making other decisions, but, but but that's a really interesting thing because in today's world, with the pace of change and the new emerging things, sitting on 15 to 20-year-old technology or, not trying to do this with spreadsheets is really not really a realistic plan.

What the customer's really trying to figure out is. What is the least dangerous thing I could do? And that's because we talk to our salespeople all the time and our company thinks about the, the empathy for the person who has that problem, what's the least dangerous thing I could do? And that's hard to figure out in this situation with the pace of change being so high.

[00:08:24] Ken Lempit: The personal risk to the decision maker doesn't get enough consideration, I don't think in, you know, enterprise sales and marketing, you know, the people who are putting their political capital on the line to bring some new software in, you know, they do, they do face a risk. So, um, interesting part of it.

You, you mentioned new consumption models for, SaaS and really AI I think is really where this is happening the most. Can you talk to me about the experiments people are running in pricing and what's showing promise or really interesting. 

[00:08:57] Mark Walker: There are some overall trends they can talk about. So let's talk about what the leading AI companies are experimenting with, and then what I would say the legacy or mature, scaled, and frankly growing.

SaaS companies are experimenting with, they're actually different experiments because they're different situations, right? But there's a common theme. So basically what the challenge everybody's getting into is nobody actually knows where the value of the, of what they're providing is going to settle in terms of a pricing model.

So to give you an example, say you sold a seat based system for resolving tickets or for selling something or whatever, you know, seat based system. Well, everybody already understood how that related to value because the people who did this thing would use that, that your software to organize the work that they did to, to achieve the goal, and therefore you could actually make that decision as you start to present

or compete with, you don't have to present it. You just have to compete with someone who's offering an agentic model, in other words, where it's not connected to the seats anymore. Because it's not people doing stuff or an agentic model that causes the effectiveness of people in the seats to go like way up.

So you need less people, which is kind of the same thing, or that does the work itself, so actually resolves tickets by itself or, or does a transaction by itself. Direct chat bot interface. Then you have to change the model, but you have to change the model whether or not you are doing that. So if your competitor changes the model, you have to change your model because.

You're gonna have to match it unless you have market setting power, right? So what they're, people are starting to do with the, with the larger AI providers are, are doing this and they're not even replacing something legacy. The legacy competitor is their own next product, right? So, so they're going to their customers and saying, we'd like you to commit a certain amount of spend.

And and so these spend commitments, there's sort of three flavors of them, and the third one's the most interesting. The first one is prepaid spend. So your price is determined not by how much you use, but by how much you commit to buy. And so Nue can handle that from a contracting perspective. So say you buy $10 million, I don't really care what you spend it on, I'm gonna give you this price discount.

You buy $9 million, it's less, you know, that, that kind of thing. Pre-build is one, one case. So you, you sign the agreement and you get a bill for $10 million and then you can use up to the number of things that add up to

$10 million, and then later you might get another bill. The second one is post build commitments.

So you, you sign up, commit to $10 million, you actually just get a, you then start using it and, I don't know, use eight $80,000 in the first month or whatever, or eight, $800,000 in the first month, and you get a bill for that. More the next month, more the next month, and at the end of the year you get a bill for either the overage or the difference between your commitment.

Okay, so that's the second type. The third type's the really interesting one, if you think about it, the second type introduces actually both of the first two produce a moral hazard that, that you're billing the customer for something they didn't use. Now, even though that's not true, because it affected the pricing and everything else, that's the way they feel about it.

And so we're starting to have people wanting to have. What I would call bank build commitments, where they basically are saying, we're going to bill you, but the head of revenues like, you know, dear God, no, don't bill them, or the head of customer success, the chief customer officers is going know, if we end the situation where there's like a $2 million gap between what they expect you to spend and what they did spend, we want to basically stop that bill from going out, right?

To do that thing that, and frankly, you could make, have versions of that. You have to not only catch the contract before the bill goes out and stop the billing engine, which is much easier if the billing engine's in the CPQ like, like ours is, but then you have to basically, potentially change the contract backwards in time, in a way that adjusts the price on everything backwards for your rev rec.

It's very human, very real, and very complicated. 

[00:13:06] Ken Lempit: I mean, my mind went right to revenue recognition. It's like you're as a CRO, you could think you're having a great quarter only to find three or four of your large customers not utilizing their commitment, right? 

[00:13:18] Mark Walker: Yeah. And then when you factor in the fact that the cost of compute is going through the floor, but the use cases of tokens is going, you know, through the roof, right?

So customers are really, you know, uncertain about where their price is gonna come up. So then we end up with, also conditional caps, all sorts of other things that are sitting on top of these things. So even, the case I gave you, even though those sounded crazy, those are the simplified cases. Now for companies that are actually running existing SaaS companies that are trying to introduce this, they're trying to do it without cannibalizing the ARR they already have. Because consumption pure consumption model isn't ARR, it's re-occurring revenue. Not recurring revenue, right? And so they're really concerned about that. I think that distinction is going away. I think that that, valuations are being, treating those two things the same, but they're not... what they don't wanna do is all of a sudden discover that their outcome-based pricing turns out to be massively cheaper for their customer than their seat based pricing.

And all of a sudden they really did drive their revenue through the floor. So that means lots and lots and lots of experiments before you actually go to the bold deployment. And the hard thing about experiments in quote to cash is you own them. Like if you decide to make your pricing model based on the number of penguins that somebody owns.

You're counting penguins for at least the next three to five years, and there's no way around it, even if only three people accepted that you either got a trigger churn or somehow buy out the contract, but it's a big deal. 

[00:14:54] Ken Lempit: We could almost do maybe even beyond an episode on pricing experiments. You could probably write a book on pricing experiments.

[00:15:01] Mark Walker: So, but we have a day, like right away. So given, given that 

[00:15:05] Ken Lempit: we only have 30 minutes, we gotta move on. Yeah. But this is one of my favorite topics. Maybe we're gonna have to revisit this with you. 

I wanna get into your, coming into the company you know, you had done some VC-backed work before at a larger scale.

And so then you as a veteran CEO, come into a seed stage startup. Like how did that happen and what was your experience of, of kind of going into that kind of situation? 

[00:15:32] Mark Walker: Yeah, I mean, I think I alluded to it, you know, Tina, Tina built the company. Tina designed the company and more incredibly. Tina also came up with the entire business plan of what we were gonna do, and we're kind of still running Tina's plan now, like I just got the opportunity to lead this team. But I have this partner, CTO, who my first question, after she explained what she wanted to do, I said, sorry, why aren't you the CEO? Like you be the CEO.

I'll, I'll help you. i'll support you. I, I think you're incredible. And, and then she explained that the product is so big and what we're doing is so audacious that. She needed to focus on that and she needed a partner to focus on the business, right? So, you know, people go, why did you join to join? Like, I didn't need a job.

I just sold a company, a TA. We owned that thing completely. That that is a good thing to happen in your life. But I was drawn to her, her vision, the clarity of her vision, her commitment to our customers, which continues to this day. She's like ridiculously one of the most committed people, that I've ever worked with.

And the opportunity to work at that level of the discrete accord is. I crazy-ass attractive. And then we built this team around us, that's just frankly unbelievable. 

[00:16:36] Ken Lempit: How did this opportunity get to you? 

[00:16:38] Mark Walker: one of the early investors, you know, certain investors invest in this sort of situation of a certain amount of chutzpah.

You know, if you're gonna go say, Hey, we pour millions of dollars into something before it gets to revenue, like tens of like, you know, we use $15 million of seed, right? And so one of them, they realized that she needed a, a partner and a CEO. And so he, they reached out to me.

And and I said, you know, so no, I want to go kiteboarding. And then I met Tina and so it was actually a, a VC. The guy's named Robert Antoniades, at Information Venture Partners and he introduced us and I helped her for a bit and then you know, kinda like take the puppy home for the evening.

You know, you fall in love with her vision and that was that. 

[00:17:22] Ken Lempit: That's pretty funny. That's how I got Donna to agree to adopt our dog. 

[00:17:27] Mark Walker: Yep. 

[00:17:28] Ken Lempit: Fostered the dog by day three, she was hooked. So sounds, sounds like a good way to get yourself a job. I don't compare 

[00:17:35] Mark Walker: Tina to a dog, by the way. She's a, she's a, you know, remarkable person.

I was more just thinking the company as, as the dog. Oh, I thought you were the dog. I thought you were the dog. Maybe I am the dog. That's a probably, that's probably a better analogy actually, is I was the, I was the puppy. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:17:51] Ken Lempit: So, how did you get on those VCs radar? I think that's, you know, they're folks that haven't had their first

experience being drafted, and that's almost what this is, right? You, you're sort of like a draft pick by this VC. How did that come about and how does somebody become, or, or find themselves on the radar of VCs or PE firms? 

[00:18:13] Mark Walker: Ironically the CEO of another CPQ company made the connection and you know, it was one of those things where, look,

Rob's a really great investor. He is also a great person, and he and he basically was solving a problem for his portfolio company and he just basically asked his network and, and somebody said, have you ever thought of Mark Walker? And he is just, he is a NetSuite in Salesforce, you know, compliance public company guy is, he is built companies.

He's sold companies like, you know, we run a company for Rogers, like, you know. Maybe Mark Walker. And so Rob reached out to me and I said no a few times and then eventually I said yes. 

[00:18:57] Ken Lempit: I think that's a great secret, by the way, to getting the job you want say no at least twice. I've done that before. I was saying no because I would meant no, I was actually going, I really wanna go kiteboarding.

[00:19:08] Mark Walker: My wife didn't want me to have a job. The dog didn't want me to have a job like, like it was, like it was. Being a CO is exhausting. Like at least the way I do it, like I'm a hundred percent, 150%. There was one of our staff said recently. When they were rejecting somebody, she goes a hard no. And I said, why?

And she goes, I just don't think he's gonna give 200%. You know? And that's kind of the esprit de corps we have in our team. And, and so, uh, so I was, you know, after, after having sold a company and worked as hard as I did. That company I kind of thought that maybe I'd cool my heels for a bit. So I was really saying no not to to negotiate.

Really saying no to say no. 

[00:19:45] Ken Lempit: Fair enough. But I wanna follow up the hard work thing you said to me in the prep, this work is too hard not to love it. So how do you find the people that thrive on hard problems and build a resilient team? 

[00:19:59] Mark Walker: I mean, I think we, we say it around the company. It's not just my saying, we say it, you know, around the company.

I've said it actually to the company. Not so much last year, but the year before. I said to the whole company in standup, I said, if you don't love it here, you should definitely leave. Like, because this is gonna be horrible. Like what we have to do in the next year is gonna be so hard.

That that there there'll be blood on the floor. Like, and so if you don't love everybody you work with, if you don't, you know, come here, you know, as driven by the challenge, as Tina and I are. Then, then go and we'll package you out. Nobody took the offer and nobody left. But I think it's true, like complaining about the stress of running a startup is like complaining about the snow at the top of Mount Everest.

You know, I, it's one of the things I say to people, I say, don't join this 'cause you think this is gonna be an easy place to work. Growing at the kind of pace that we're growing at and, and working with the sort of customers we work with is demanding and we expect. You'll see the people around you giving everything to what we do and to our customers.

And so if you're not signed up for that don't do it. Now, that doesn't mean working every single hour. It's not working ridiculous amount of hours. Although there are people on our team who do that. In fact, there's almost everybody on the team does that every once in a while. That's not the standard.

The standard is putting everything of your intellectual power into doing what you do in a brilliant and complete way. And that's, frankly, that's draining to do that all the time at the pace we're doing it. So, so we just tell people straight out, this is what it's gonna be like. And if you don't wanna do that, then don't join.

[00:21:32] Ken Lempit: I, I think that's hard for people that haven't worked in a startup to empathize with right. It's a, it's a different beast altogether. 

[00:21:42] Mark Walker: Yeah and it's like, it's basically like, you know, what do you think? Like, you think it's easy being on an NFL team, right? Like that's what you have to think of it as. You're playing an elite sport.

You need to constantly be improving yourself. You need to be constantly working at it. And, and being elite is hard work. 

[00:22:02] Ken Lempit: Absolutely. Hey, I wanna talk a little bit about go to market and I wanna start where you started, which is that you launched the product focused tightly on Salesforce oriented companies that needed, I guess, startups themselves that needed, or early stage companies that needed CPQ.

So how did you find that? Like how did you land upon that focus and how did that help you find product market fit quickly? 

[00:22:28] Mark Walker: That was part of what Tino's audacious plan. I mean, if you think about it, the operating system of scale tech, not necessarily of startups, but of scale tech is historically, has historically been Salesforce CPQ into Zuora or sometimes one of the flavors of NetSuite related billing.

Right? There are some other versions of that, but that's where most of it is, right? And, and so, you know, we basically realized that, you know, we'd go after that market because even though that is a narrower part of the entire market, that's obviously a much bigger recurring revenue market. Outside of that. That piece is where the money is.

As John Dillinger, the gangster said I robbed banks because that's where the money is right? If they kept the money somewhere else, I'd rob those places. So we went after it because, we paradoxically thought that it was actually the softest place, but within that market, we then very, very tightly focused on the AI companies and their needs. Because we understood that what was going to cause that market to shift was the future, not the past.

If nothing was changing, people would probably go, ah, I don't wanna change my CPQ or Don't change, wanna change my billing system. But because of what's about to happen is happening right now. They don't really have a choice. They have to change it in some way. And so being the company that's furthest down with the most experienced about what the future is gonna run like is an incredible power.

[00:23:53] Ken Lempit: So is that, I mean, it's almost like a crossing the chasm kind of thing, right? So you're going, you're going where the early adopters want to go and you're gonna. Yeah, exactly. You're gonna follow as adoption of. Different, or you know, the newer consumption based or token pricing becomes more widespread.

It'll already be pretty well versed in how to bring that into these companies. 

[00:24:17] Mark Walker: Yeah. And of course there's other companies who execute the same strategy that we are closely aligned with, particularly Metronome. I would say a very large footprint of our customers run both Nue and Metronome. Metronome is awesome at turning data into billable events, and there's a place where we overlap, where the contracting needs to inform the billing system.

And Scott Woody and, and and his partner James over there, and the whole team, you know, remarkable people. So we're not the only people who have been focusing on this problem. We just, again, focusing on the future. It seems like a pretty good strategy. I think it gets a go to market today.

Pick an existing market where the people are not moving very quickly and focus on what the future of that market looks like and build for that. And don't worry about supporting the people who are not going with the future. They will eventually come to you. 

[00:25:07] Ken Lempit: As a HubSpot partner for 13 years, I find it interesting that the AI companies are reliant on Salesforce.

Just sort of a, it's like a little bit of a cognitive dissonance for me, or are they on the edge of Salesforce implementation? 

[00:25:21] Mark Walker: I think the reason is, is these are very complex businesses. Like, in other words, if you're selling an AI product to like, I don't know, Bob's bait and tackle, maybe you don't need.

Maybe you don't need Salesforce, right? But if you're selling it to Boeing, you can have like complex, like imagine all the complexity we just talked about and then imagine that you are actually selling master contracts across multiple divisions of a multinational company in multiple jurisdictions.

And you, you have multiple different reps who are all working in different languages, possibly trying to service this thing. So we're just not focused, like we actually do have customers that are, that are complete startups, but they're complete startups are moving really quickly, that have really, really clear understanding of why they would need a system as complicated as Salesforce to run their business.

And they use Nue to simplify and turn it into a business system. They can operate, but the vast majority of our customers are like on their way to billions of dollars in revenue. Even if we get them at like, you know, I don't know, 30 million or something, they're still like bam, right? And so they understand the complexity that's coming.

[00:26:28] Ken Lempit: I really thought that was very interesting about the, the, the reason why for a, a large scale CRM like Salesforce. I think it makes a lot of sense and honestly, I've never heard it said so simply.

So thank you. That was really great. I wanna go one more place and go to market. You have what you've described as a carpet bombing awareness strategy where you've layered on things like Sirius Radio, along with LinkedIn and other ways to get your message to market, little bit unconventional.

Why is that working well for you and better than a traditional demand or lead gen model? 

[00:27:04] Mark Walker: Because there's a, a tactical reason why you should talk new and a strategic reason, right? And so the tactical reason gets you in the door by the low value solution because people could think of different things.

So say for example, I need to, to quote this specific thing because my boss told. That's tactical, right? And, and when you do that, you end up in a conversation about feature function that maybe isn't the best place to be, right? But the strategic reason is, is you need to get the systems that you're gonna need to adapt your pricing now before you adapt your pricing.

Because if you don't, you won't be able to adapt your pricing and you're gonna go bankrupt, right? That's a strategic conversation, right? And so, it's easy to reach the decision makers. It's easy to reach the influencers and the rev ops people and the people who are charged with solving tactical problems.

And by the way, I don't wanna undersell this. I'm being simplifying because of course the people we're dealing with in the rev ops community understand the strategic implications of what they're doing. I don't wanna, but, but what we don't get to do. Marketing normally is talked to the C-level people.

'cause they don't go on LinkedIn, they don't, they don't search for solutions on Google. We don't, the intent data we're seeing is not from them. So what we do is we use display advertising and radio advertising and you talked about paradoxically and some other things to wrap them in an awareness bubble that basically is explaining this, the what we solve for companies.

So that when somebody. Brings it forward as a suggestion, they're able to respond rather than, I've never heard of Nue blah, blah, blah, blah. Except aren't that, isn't that the system that OpenAI uses and the system anthropic uses? That's really interesting to me. Can you tell me how our problem is similar to their problem and why you think we should use this?

And that happens imperfectly, but when it happens, it's, it's very helpful. I 

[00:29:07] Ken Lempit: would say when it happens, it's perfect, right? Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:29:10] Mark Walker: Thank you. 

[00:29:11] Ken Lempit: That's really awesome. I, I think what you're talking about is having a brand awareness strategy as well as solution awareness,

right? And I think too few CEOs, so kudos to you too. Few CEOs invest in the brand and they're, they're looking only at the, the KPIs. That used to work really well. So, you know, how many people filled out a form on my website as opposed to how many people are influenced by our thinking or are becoming interested in the topic and our product as a result of our marketing, so.

[00:29:45] Mark Walker: yeah, I think, I think giving the credit to the CE for this is, is again, it, it's like I'm the spokesperson and the head. We have an amazing team, and these strategies are constantly being built and innovated by people in our go-to market and, marketing teams that are basically constantly thinking about this, you know, frankly obsessing about it and, and doing an amazing job.

I get to, support their decision to invest in these areas. And definitely the Sirius radio thing is my idea, but most of the ideas are, are coming actually from my team and definitely the iteration of the mix. 

[00:30:18] Ken Lempit: I just think it's really, you know, I do, I've been doing this a long time and I, I've met more CEOs are less interested in the brand and its impact on go to market than you might hope.

So, um, maybe that's a great place to leave our episode that, thoughtful CEOs think about their brand, their go to market, their sales, their product. They have to think about it all, and they need a great team around them to make those things happen. If people wanna learn, if people wanna learn more about Nue and possibly reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:30:53] Mark Walker: Well, obviously to, to learn more about Nue, you can either go to Nue.io or basically ask your favorite GPT or I mean ask your favorite large language model. You know that, that they know a lot about us. If you wanna contact me, I'm on LinkedIn all the time. If I can help you, just reach out and just tell me exactly what you want.

You may get a response from my EA 'cause my EA reads all my, my LinkedIn connection requests but you know, if you wanna contact somebody in our company 'cause you wanna sell 'em to something, sure, just tell me that and I will, try to be responsive and try to introduce you to the right person.

And if you need advice or something like that, just tell me that too. 

[00:31:30] Ken Lempit: Fabulous. Appreciate that. Folks wanna reach out to me? I'm on LinkedIn/in/kenlempit. My demand generation agency for software and AI companies is Austin Lawrence. We're at austinlawrence.com. If this episode didn't convince you to subscribe to the podcast, SaaS backwards, I'm not sure what will, but please do so.

And, Mark Walker, thanks so much for being with us today. 

[00:31:58] Mark Walker: Hey Ken, thank you so much, I enjoyed it.